Author
Topic: Got bots? (Read 4250 times)

might wanna throw in a voting mechanism to combat bot voting. Lost city shard is definitely guilty. I think UO Evolution jumped 500 votes overnight so I suspect them too, though their votes might be legit, they got the pop to maybe do that.

I'll be honest it's something I wanted to do and just never got around to it. There is a very basic mechanism to stop voting too fast, but it definitely can still be automated. I know there are some shards that fudge their online count as well, but not much we can do about that, there is no way to actually get the online count except for what the server tells us, and it's not really complicated to code it so it sends a bigger number.

Don't worry I hate the idea too, but that's why it allows to sort. Perhaps I need to change the default sort order. Votes are more of a "nice to have" thing but they are meaninglyess in general. There will always be people who try to cheat the system. It's also hard to prove, I would not want to punish a shard for a false detection of cheating. Ex: Youtube does this all the time by shutting down people's channels for no reason because it "triggered" something. So it's a fine line to walk on.

One thing I have been thinking is to simply graph the votes. People can then draw their own conclusion.

But just want to reassure everyone it is something on the back of my mind, I admittedly don't do much work on this site but it's something I do want to revisit. I just have lot of other projects on the go too such as my own shard, but even that kinda took the back burner.

And yes my shard is actually listed too and no there is zero advantage hard coded or anything.

I have toyed with idea of ad space where someone can advertise their shard on top though, but I'm not sure yet if I want to do that. I don't want to make it look like I'm "selling out".

What about just adding google racapcha? It's easy to install and it would solve problem. Almost all voting websites already got it.

Btw, considering adverts... Google adsense only pays for 'clicking' at ads, not for showing them. So when bots doing a lot of votes - they do not give any additional $. On the contrary, bots making adsense ads having very bad CPC rating for your website...

Yeah I really need to start thinking about this more, just busy with other projects so have not had a chance to really look into it.

Server logs seem to indicate that a lot of these bots make little to no effort of masking the fact that they are a bot. I find that rather humorous. There's no point in me blocking them one by one though as they'll just come back, so I'll want to add a proper captcha. Probably end up just using Recaptcha or something.

I will be revamping my sites where everything ties into a single login, almost tempted to require an account to vote, that way there is one central point of authentication/check to prevent cheating. I would then use recapcha or similar service for the account creation. Not sure if I want to do this though, it may be annoying to have to sign up just to vote for a shard. And of course it does not stop people from creating a bunch of accounts.

Woah - almost 14,000 votes by UO Shard in barely 3 days. At some point it's begging for a ban. That will invariably lead to a claim that unknown actors set up the voting bots to get them tossed. Did you notice they're hosted in the same room as this site?

I would rather our shard have one honest vote than a thousand fakes!

Wow. During my composition of this message they seem to have been de-listed. Talk about quick action!

I saw that one. I have no immediate plans to start dealing with these as I need to come up with a proper system, but that one was on the completely blatant ridiculous side. I did not quite delist it but let's just say they won't be on the top for a bit.